Walt
Whitman
Birth and Early Career
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Born 31 May 1819 near Huntington, Long
Island, New York |
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Second child (of 8) born to Walter and
Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. |
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Works as printer’s apprentice (to 1835)
and as a schoolteacher. |
The Journalist, 1844
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Worked for several different newspapers |
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Wrote short fiction from 1841-1848 |
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Themes and techniques borrowed from Poe
and Hawthorne |
The Brooklyn Eagle
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1846-1848. Becomes chief editor of the
Brooklyn Eagle, a post he holds from
from March 5, 1846 to January 18, 1848. |
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In May 1848, Whitman is fired because
his politics conflict with those of the publisher. A “free soil” or
“locofoco”Democrat, Whitman opposes the expansion of slavery into new
territories. |
“Pulp Fiction”
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Franklin Evans, 1842 |
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Temperance novel |
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Sold 20,000 copies, |
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more than any other |
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work Whitman published |
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in his lifetime |
New Orleans
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Lives in New Orleans for 4 months as
editor of the Daily Crescent. |
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Sees slavery and slave-markets at first
hand |
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Experiences with nature (“live oaks,
with moss”) and with French language later appear in his poetry. |
Influences: Literature
and Music
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Italian opera: “Were it not for the
opera, I could never have written Leaves of Grass.” |
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Shakespeare, especially Richard III. Whitman
saw Junius Brutus Booth (father of John Wilkes Booth) perform. |
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The Bible |
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Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus |
Emerson
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Emerson helped Whitman to “find
himself”: “I was simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.” |
Literary Acquaintances
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Edgar Allan Poe |
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William Cullen Bryant |
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Amos Bronson Alcott |
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Henry David Thoreau |
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Friends at Pfaff’s Restaurant
(“Bohemians”)(1859-1862) |
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Elihu Vedder, E.C. Stedman, Ada Clare,
Henry Clapp |
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Whitman and Phrenology
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July 16, 1849: A phrenological
examination confirms Whitman’s sense of his own character, revealing bumps of
“Sympathy, Sublimity, and Self-Esteem” along with the “dangerous fault of
Indolence” |
Whitman in 1854
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His friend Dr. Maurice Bucke called
this “the Christ likeness” in which the poet as seer begins to emerge. |
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In Leaves of Grass, Whitman would
write, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” |
Leaves of Grass, 1855
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Twelve poems, including |
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“Song of Myself” |
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“I Sing the Body Electric” |
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“The Sleepers” |
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Only 795 copies printed |
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Family tradition says that Whitman set
some of the type for this edition. |
Leaves of Grass, 1855
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Walt Whitman, an American, one of the
roughs, a kosmos, |
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Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . .
eating drinking and breeding, |
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No sentimentalist . . . . no stander
above men and women or apart from them . . . . no more modest than immodest. |
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Whoever degrades another degrades me .
. . . and whatever is done or said returns
at last to me, |
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And whatever I do or say I also return. |
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Whitman’s Themes
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Transcendent power of love,
brotherhood, and comradeship |
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Imaginative projection into others’
lives |
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Optimistic faith in democracy and
equality |
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Belief in regenerative and illustrative
powers of nature and its value as a teacher |
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Equivalence of body and soul and the
unabashed exaltation of the body and sexuality |
Whitman’s Poetic
Techniques
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Free verse: lack of metrical regularity
and conventional rhyme |
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Use of repeated images, symbols,
phrases, and grammatical units |
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Use of enumerations and catalogs |
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Use of anaphora (initial repetition) in
lines and “Epanaphora” (each line hangs by a loop from the line before it) |
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The Whitman “envelope” |
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Contrast and parallelism in paired
lines |
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From “Song of Myself”
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Where the heifers browse, and the geese
nip their food with short jerks; |
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Where the sundown shadows lengthen over
the limitless and lonesome prairie, |
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Where the herds of buffalo make a crawling
spread of the square miles far and
near; |
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Where the hummingbird shimmers . . . . where
the neck of the longlived swan is
curving and winding |
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Where the laughing-gull scoots by the
slappy shore and laughs her near-human laugh . . . |
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Whitman’s Use of Language
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Idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation. |
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Words used for their sounds as much as
their sense; foreign languages |
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Use of language from several
disciplines |
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The sciences: anatomy, astronomy,
botany (especially the flora and fauna of America) |
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Businesses and professions, such as
carpentry |
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Military and war terms; nautical terms |
Reviews: Praise
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Ralph Waldo Emerson, letter to Whitman,
21 July 1855: |
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“I find [Leaves of Grass] the most
extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. . .
. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a
long foreground somewhere, for such a start.” |
Reviews: Praise
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I am not unaware that the charge of
coarseness and sensuality has been affixed to them. My moral constitution may
be hopelessly tainted or - too sound to be tainted, as the critic wills, but
I confess that I extract no poison from these Leaves - to me they have
brought only healing. --Fanny Fern, critic and popular essayist |
Reviews and Protests
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“Foul work" filled
with"libidinousness" (The
Christian Examiner) |
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There are too many persons, who imagine
they demonstrate their superiority to their fellows, by disregarding all the
politenesses and decencies of life, and, therefore,justify themselves in
indulging the vilest imaginings and shamefullest license. (Rufus Griswold, The
Criterion) |
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Early Editions of Leaves
of Grass
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1855 Self-published the first edition |
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1856 Added new poems and revised old
ones. |
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1860 Began grouping poems thematically;
includes “A Child’s Reminiscence,” which will become “Out of the Cradle,
Endlessly Rocking” |
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1867 Incorporates Drum-Taps (1865),
including “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain, My
Captain” |
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Leaves of Grass, 1856
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Whitman has Emerson’s praise printed on
the spine in gold letters: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” |
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“I do not believe that all the sermons,
so-called, that have been preached in this land put together are equal to it
for preaching." Henry David Thoreau |
Leaves of Grass, 1860
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146 new poems added to the 32 poems of
the second edition, including “I hear America singing” |
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Enfans d’Adam section, 15 poems on
“amativeness” or love for women, and Calamus, 32 poems on “adhesiveness” or
love between men |
Civil War
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After his brother is wounded at
Fredericksburg (1862), Whitman goes to Washington to care for him and stays
for nearly 3 years, visiting the wounded, writing letters, and keeping up
their spirits. |
One Wounded Soldier’s
View
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“Every Sunday there were half a dozen
old roosters who would come into my ward and preach and pray and sing to us,
while we were swearing to ourselves all the time, and wishing the blamed old
fools would go away. Walt Whitman’s funny stories, and his pipes and
tobaccos, were worth more than all the preachers and tracts in Christendom.” |
Whitman and Lincoln
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Whitman saw Lincoln often, but the two
never met face to face. |
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“When lilacs last in the dooryard
bloom’d” |
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“O Captain, My Captain” |
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Walt Whitman, Civil
Servant
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1862, Clerk at the Paymaster’s Office |
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1865. 1 January. Becomes a clerk at the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, a post he enjoys. |
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Fired in May because Secretary of the
Interior James Harlan sees Leaves of Grass in Whitman’s desk drawer and
denounces it as immoral. |
The Good Gray Poet
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May 1865. Whitman’s friend William
Douglas O’Connor secures him a job at the Attorney General’s office, a post
he holds until he leaves after he suffers a stroke in 1873. |
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O’Connor publishes The Good Gray Poet:
A Vindication (1866), the beginning of a shift in Whitman’s public persona
and popularity. |
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Later Editions of Leaves
of Grass
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1872 Includes 120-page “annex,” A
Passage to India |
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1881-1882 The firm of James R. Osgood
discontinues publishing Leaves of Grass after it is banned in Boston; Whitman
takes the copies and binds and sells them himself. |
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1888-1889 Leaves of Grass (Birthday
Edition) is the first pocket-sized version. |
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1891-92 “Deathbed Edition” |
Leaves of Grass, 1872
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Includes Drum-Taps and Sequel to
Drum-Taps |
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Includes an “annex,” A Passage to India |
Specimen Days and Collect,
1882
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Autobiographical work with focus on the
Civil War and Whitman’s trip west to Kansas and Colorado |
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Counterpart to the 1881-1882 edition of
Leaves of Grass |
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Begun much earlier as Memoranda During
the War and partly inspired by Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches |
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328 Mickle Street, Camden
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In 1884, Whitman purchases a house at
328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, for $1750. |
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It is the first house he has ever
owned. |
Leaves of Grass, 1889 and
1891
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1891 edition includes Good-Bye, My
Fancy |
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These editions mix autobiographical
prose reminiscences with poetry. |
The Poet at Home
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Whitman would allow no one to pick up
his papers, saying that whatever he wanted surfaced sooner or later. |
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Whitman died on 26 March 1892 at about
6:30 p.m. and is buried in the tomb that he had designed. |
Credits
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Sources are given in the notes section
of the slides except as noted in the notes below. |
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Pictures are courtesy of the Walt
Whitman Hypertext Archive at the University of Virginia:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman/ |